


heartbeats

by jemmasimmmons



Series: are we out of the woods yet? [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Freeform, the rest of the team appear in various forms, trigger warnings for, vomit/retching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-14
Updated: 2015-08-14
Packaged: 2018-04-14 17:44:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4573806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jemmasimmmons/pseuds/jemmasimmmons
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The first thing she knows is that there is a heartbeat."</p>
<p>Jemma is inside an alien rock. Fitz is outside it. The only thing keeping them both hanging on is the sound of a single heartbeat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	heartbeats

**Author's Note:**

> Chronologically, this should come before both the other parts in this series but unfortunately that wasn't how my inspiration went! But because of that, this piece can be read independently of the rest of the series or as a prequel.
> 
> This developed while I was writing the other fics as short snippets of Jemma's time in the rock that I would write down as they came to me and helped keep the flow and background for the series the same. By the time I'd finished 'live inside of a moment' I had enough extracts to put together to make a full fic so I thought I might as well! I hope you enjoy this.
> 
> (Obviously this is now very much an AU scenario and, just as a disclaimer, I started this series before we knew Skye was becoming Daisy so for the purpose of this fic, she's still Skye. Hope that is not a trouble for anyone!)

 

It will be a long time before she tells him.

In fact, it will be years.

Five years to be precise: five years of adventures and tragedies, of making new discoveries both in the lab and in each other and five years of losts that will always end with founds.

It will take her five years of learning to be herself again, five years of kisses in the sunlight and under the stars, and five years of telling fragments of memories before she is ready to piece the mosaic pieces together for him to offer a full picture.

He will never push her to tell him, something which she will be always be incredibly grateful for. It is just one of the billion and one reasons she loves him. But she will know that he wants to her to tell him, especially on the nights she wakes in a cold sweat with a cry on her lips that wakes him too, even from the other side of the bed they now share together.

They will have told each other many things now.

And, as he holds her gently in his arms after a nightmare to absorb the shocks still trembling through her body, and whispers ‘tell me’ for the umpteenth time, she will finally be ready to tell him this too.

When she does tell him, this will be what she says.

 

 

 

 

The first thing she knows is that there is a heartbeat.

Jemma cannot tell to whom it belongs to. It is regular, and sounds fairly normal except for being half a beat slower than the normal resting heartrate should be.

Maybe it’s hers.

But it is loud as well, too loud, and she can feel it on the tips of her toes and the top of her forehead and it does not feel as if the sound can possibly be coming from her.

Maybe it’s something else’s heartbeat.

Jemma does not have long to dwell on that, though. Everything feels heavy and there is a weight pressing down on her head that seems to be pushing all thoughts from her brain, eager to sink her into nothing again.

Jemma lets it, because it is too much effort to resist, but not before a single, simple thought comes to her as the last thing she knows before everything is gone again.

She is hungry.

_I was supposed to be going to dinner._

Next, she opens her eyes.

There is not much to see. It’s just colours, mostly: brown and black, but if she blinks there is red too, pulsing slightly behind the browns which makes her wonder again whether the heartbeat she can hear belongs to the rock instead of to her.

(Because that is where she is now, inside the rock. There seems little point in trying to reason otherwise so Jemma decides it is best just to accept it instead. She is inside the rock.)

When she looks down, which takes a herculean effort, Jemma can see her body and her clothes and shoes, just as they had been before, this should be somewhat comforting. There does not appear to be a solid mass beneath her feet to stand on and when she flexes out her fingers they move, but it does not feel like she is freely floating either.

Around her head, the heartbeat grows louder.

Jemma closes her eyes.

 

 

The next time she opens them, she can hear voices over the slow pulse of the heartbeat.

They are not distinguishable to her, not by accent or pitch or tone, and they are muffled too but she can tell that they are coming from outside of the rock. They are coming from her team.

Straining her ears, Jemma tries to listen.

‘Show me again.’ It’s May, Jemma decides. There is no evidence to support this but the undeniable certainty she feels, stronger than anything else she has experienced so far in the rock. It’s May.

‘Here. It plays again when you press the arrow.’ The person speaking must be passing a tablet to her to be explaining how it works. Jemma can’t tell who it is, or what they must be watching.

‘How long?’ May, again.

‘Sixteen hours, forty three minutes.’ She should know this voice, Jemma realises. This is a voice she should know.

‘And you’ve seen nothing else since then?’

‘Nothing. We’ve watched all the security footage and one of us has been in here ever since we realised what had happened to her. We’ve seen nothing.’

The voices are beginning to differentiate now, and become more familiar to her. The last person to speak had been Coulson, she’s sure of it. He sounds tired, and older too.

‘I shouldn’t have left her.’ It’s the same voice from before, and Jemma knows who it is now: it’s Fitz. Of _course_ it’s Fitz, who else would it be, how could she not have _known_? ‘I shouldn’t have left her alone with it.’

‘Don’t.’ Skye’s voice now, fiercely. ‘You couldn’t have known what would happen. How could you have known this could happen?’

‘I pushed the latch open.’

It is realisation, cold and terrifying, that she hears in Fitz’s voice, followed by the horrified quiet in the room around him. Jemma remembers too, how the simple slide of his arm against the case had pushed the lock out of its place and opened it ready for her to fall in.

‘Jesus.’ Mack, breaking the silence.

‘Do you think…’ Bobbi’s voice is soft and her words are shaky. ‘Do you think she’s…?’

She lets the question trail off, unfinished, but she doesn’t really need to finish it. Jemma knows that it’s what everyone is thinking anyway.

‘It’s a rock.’ Hunter is the last voice to speak and he sounds seriously pissed off – not at anyone in particular, though, just the universe in general. ‘She’s inside _a fucking alien rock_.’

There isn’t really anything anyone has to say to that.

Around her, Jemma feels the heartbeat get louder.

A moment passes, and then Jemma hears a noise coming from where the voices are. It sounds like a footstep, but it is louder and echoing.

‘Skye, what are you doing?’ Coulson’s voice again, suddenly pricking with uncertainty.

‘Shh.’ Another footstep.

‘Skye…’ May, in a warning.

‘Just shh, just for a second!’

There is a three second pause, and two more footsteps, before Fitz’s voice cuts in anxiously.

‘Skye, stop it’s dangerous!’

‘How many people are in this room?’

It is a fairly abrupt change of topic and it apparently leaves the rest of her team floundering. Jemma, on the other hand, thinks she may understand.

‘Seven.’ Mack answers her eventually, sounding irked. ‘But what the hell does that have to do with-‘

‘I can hear your heartbeats,’ Skye interrupts, taking another footstep. ‘The vibrations are loud enough, and if I tune into them I can hear them all. They sort of overlap, but I can count them if I try hard enough.’

Jemma hears another footstep, and knows that by now Skye must be right outside the glass case her rock is in.

‘Eight,’ Skye says quietly.

‘What did you say?’ Bobbi, in disbelief.

‘Skye…’ Fitz, breathlessly. Hopefully.

‘Eight,’ Skye repeats, and there is a gentle humming of the glass and Jemma knows that Skye must have put her hand up to rest it against the case. Slowly, she raises her own arm, feeling as if she is treading through tar, and brings it up to where she imagines Skye’s hand might be. Under her touch, the rock’s wall feels like it could move.

‘I can hear eight heartbeats.’

 

 

What happens next does not surprise her. Obviously, now they have found out she is alive inside the rock, they have to decide the best way to get her out of it whilst still keeping her that way.

It turns out to be a lot easier said than done.

‘Any ideas?’

It’s Skye, and the first time anyone has spoken since May and Coulson left the room a while back, in a flurry of phone calls and frantic activity. Since then, the movements she can hear tell Jemma that her remaining five teammates have all moved forward to stand in a row closer to her case.

(Already, she is thinking of it as hers. Which can’t be a good sign.)

_Smash it_.

‘I say we smash it,’ Hunter says, with determination. ‘We get it out of that case, get the biggest hammers we’ve got and we break the bloody thing open. Get her out as fast as fucking possible and be done with it.’

‘Bad plan.’ Mack’s low voice rumbles through Jemma’s body. ‘That thing is hard as hell, it’s not made of any kind of earthly element. I don’t even think we’d have anything strong enough to break the shell. And, even if we did, we’d probably end up hurting her more in the process.’

‘No smashing,’ Fitz agrees, and so that idea dies.

_Trigger it_.

‘There has to be a trigger,’ Bobbi says after a moment. ‘All those times it’s disintegrated while it was on the ship, we have security footage of them. If we can compare the footage, we could find whatever sets it off to do that and recreate it to get her out.’

Mack sighs. ‘Hate to be forever the bearer of bad news, but I studied that footage when I took over all this alien shit. Those times on the ship, it was random, the way it just melted. There wasn’t a regular time lapse between them, no change in light, temperature, nothing. There isn’t a trigger for it, or at least not one that I could see.’

Disappointed, they lapse into silence again.

There is a noise that reminds Jemma of a hamster eating pumpkin seeds and it takes her a moment to realise that it is Skye grinding her teeth.

‘Inhumans,’ she says eventually. ‘That thing is Kree technology and the closest thing we have to the Kree are the Inhumans. So that’s where we start.’

She’s right, of course, but after the recent events no one wants her to be. Jemma can feel the apprehension she knows she should be feeling herself send shivers through the other’s bodies as they no doubt imagine the consequences of more interactions with the Inhumans.

Skye sighs. ‘I’ll call Lincoln,’ she murmurs, and her retreating footsteps tell Jemma that she’s left the room.

The others start to leave too, but slowly. Hunter and Bobbi go first, with Hunter pushing Bobbi’s wheelchair, and then after a while Mack goes too, his footsteps heavy and melancholy.

Fitz is the only one who stays.

 

 

They set up a lab around her. Jemma hears the noises signifying the movements of lab equipment even if she doesn’t see it. Certainly, she hears Mack and Hunter’s cursing as they move heavy pieces of machinery down the halls.

There is a heart monitor though, she knows that much. It has been set up across the case and set to a frequency that amplifies the heartbeat Skye could hear so it resounds out through a set of speakers across the room so everyone else can hear it too. Mostly likely, they put it up to make sure they would know if it ever stopped beating.

When the pulse begins to match the beats she can hear inside the rock, Jemma decides that she was right the first time.

It must be _her_ heartbeat.

 

 

Time is a difficult concept inside the rock, Jemma finds, as it takes so much energy to pay attention to the sounds and voices outside. Most of the time she drifts, allowing the noise outside to brush over her like the hums of a hive of busy honey bees, and she only tunes in when she hears a voice cut through that she wants to listen to. Because of this, she loses track of how much time has passed fairly rapidly.

There are people around almost constantly, whether it is day or night – and actually, Jemma is finding it difficult to distinguish between the two.

Coulson is not there as often as the others are, though his voice reaches her sometimes through the sea of noise as she hears him bark out instructions, or give updates on protocols to the agents surrounding her. These are things that usually would make her want to pay attention but now they just make her feel heavy.

Bobbi and Hunter are there sometimes, more often than Coulson is at least, and when they are, it is always together. Whenever Jemma hears their voices, it is always as one, bickering over one another until their words weld into one and she can no longer tell who is saying what. When this happens, she has to tune out, if only to stop herself getting dizzy.

Bobbi is gets her last surgery done, a surgery Jemma was supposed to be supervising. She should be sad about this, she knows that. And yet she isn’t.

Skye is there more frequently. She talks to Jemma too, unashamedly rambling about her discoveries with Lincoln about the Kree technology even when they are surrounded by other people. She does, however, have problems with the tenses she uses to talk.

‘It’s incredible, Jemma,’ she says one time, followed by the flicking sound of parchment papers. ‘Thousands of years’ worth of history. You would have found it all so fascinating, you were always such a _nerd_ for this kind of stuff-‘

She breaks off in embarrassment once she realises what she’s said, and there is a sharp fumbling noise as Jemma imagines Skye suddenly collecting up her documents from the floor.

‘Sorry,’ she mutters as she leaves the room and Jemma can’t tell whether she is talking to her or to the other people in the room. After that, she talks a lot less and Jemma knows that this too is something she should feel sad about.

May is there a lot too. She never speaks, but Jemma knows anyway. She’s there.

Of course, it is Fitz who is there with her the most, which is not surprising. With her not there, he is the next senior scientist on the base so it is logical that he is the one leading the investigation, though there is an even more logical reason for him to be there that Jemma is not the only one who knows. He is there almost all the time and, although it is hard for her to understand how much time is passing, she realises that he can’t be spending much time doing other basic things like sleeping, or eating, or showering. This is something that she knows she should be concerned about; she _wants_ to be concerned about it. But she just can’t.

It is Fitz’s voice that she strains to hear the most, his voice that she wants to hear the words of. Sometimes, he is giving orders to the others and he gives them in such an authoritative tone Jemma likes to imagine that he is obeyed right away. Other times, Mack is with him and she hears the their two voices overlap as they discuss frequencies and ultrasounds and other things that in another lifetime would have interested her enough to listen to.

But the times Jemma likes to listen to him the most are the times when he is alone in the room, because then he talks to her. And it is not in the same way as Skye’s chattering, nor is it the tentative, stepping-on-eggshells way he had adopted since she’d returned from Hydra. When he talks to her, it is just as he used to before.

She had forgotten, really, how easy it had been for their words to fold into one another like cards from a pack when you shuffle them. It had become something she had taken for granted, she realises now, all those years she had had him by her side, speaking her thoughts before she had a chance to think them for herself.

Now, as she listens to him tell her the ideas she would have herself if she could think any more, as she hears him pause for half a beat as if he is expecting her to finish the thought for him still, Jemma realises that she was not the only one who had missed having that.

It is when he is alone with her, during a time like that, when it happens.

It has been a few days, she thinks, since she was swallowed up by the rock and now it is night-time – or at least, Jemma likes to think it’s night-time. In truth, she doesn’t really have a clue what time it is, but it feels better to have a guess and make herself believe it rather than admit that she doesn’t know. And anyway, when Fitz is alone with her it feels safe to assume it is at a time when everyone else is asleep.

Tonight, though he is angry.

‘I can’t understand it,’ he is saying, and Jemma can tell by the way his footsteps creak that he is pacing up and down the length of the case. In her mind, he is wringing his hands out in front of him too.

‘I just don’t understand! The ultrasound scanner we have is set at the highest frequency it can go and _theoretically_ , it should be able to penetrate the surface of the rock. And yet Mack keeps telling me that he can’t get it to work. Can you believe that? I did the- the _maths_ , and the physics – I corroborated the bloody machine myself, for God’s sake! – so of course it should be working!’

His voice is loud, amplified by tiredness and frustration, and cracks with a sound suspiciously like tears he is still too angry to let fall. For the first time since she has been inside the rock, Jemma feels her heart give a painful twinge.

‘But of course,’ Fitz says and his voice is saturated in angry sarcasm, so much so that it makes Jemma want to cringe. ‘It wouldn’t have to be working at all if this stupid, _bloody_ case,’ here, Jemma hears a sharp jabbing noise that makes her think he is stabbing at the glass with his finger, ‘had kept that fucking rock inside and done it’s _fucking job_!’

Suddenly, there is a violent slam and a shudder runs through the body of the rock as Fitz’s fist collides with the glass and, involuntarily, Jemma sucks in a breath.

Almost instantly, the heartbeat stops.

Fitz stops too, as the amplified heart monitor stops its regular slow beating.

‘No.’ The word is quiet, muffled by the unbearable pounding suddenly in Jemma’s ears. ‘No, no, no, no.’ There is a scuffling sound and she hears a few clicks of switches. ‘God, no please.’

He continues his frantic mutterings and Jemma wants to listen to him. She _tries_ to listen, she really does, but she is far more preoccupied with the sensation of actually _breathing in_ the inside of the rock for the first time and her awareness of it to pay Fitz her full attention.

It feels like golden syrup against her throat, but without the sugary sweet taste. It doesn’t taste like _anything_ , it’s just warm and heavy and it’s all around her and for the first time, Jemma feels the distinct sensation that she is trapped.

A brief surge of panic rises in her chest but, before she has the time to fully acknowledge it, she hears the heartbeat start again up above her head, thumping slowly in her eardrums.

It starts to come out of the speakers outside too, and Jemma hears Fitz stop his persistent tapping at the machines to listen. The pulse is just as loud as it was before but to both of them it is noticeably slower. Now, instead of being half a beat too slow, it is a full beat slower than it should be.

Jemma hears Fitz give a shaky exhale and then he is moving again, coming around to the front of the case and placing both his palms against the glass.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ he says, and when he speaks, it is in a rushed breath that he must have been holding in. ‘I didn’t think it would- I didn’t mean to hurt you, I didn’t want to hurt you.’ Through the breathless apologies, Jemma can hear that the tears he had been trying to hold in are starting to fall at last.

All of a sudden, she feels her own eyes start to sting at the thought of that and once again she feels the pang in her heart that has nothing to do with the weight of the rock bearing down against her.

_He needs to know. I have to tell him_.

Slowly, she focuses all the energy she has left into raising her left arm up from her side. She has done this before, a few times to let it rest against the crust of the rock she thinks she can feel. But she has never tried this before.

Jemma brings her arm up and once it is up, she extends her index finger until it is pressed, as firmly as she can make it, against the inside of the rock’s surface. Just as before, it feels almost spongy, as if with enough pressure applied, it would bend if she wanted it too. Jemma hesitates, then, hearing Fitz give another sob he is trying so hard to muffle against his sleeve, she pushes forward.

Then, she draws her finger up, moves it a little to the side and presses down again. Moving a little further across, Jemma pulls her finger through the rock, making an indent in the crust inside and hoping with all her heart that it was raising the surface on the outside too.

Given the way she hears Fitz give a low gasp, she guesses with joy that it was.

It takes her a while, carefully moving her finger up and down while making short dots or dashes in the rock’s surface, but she feels safe knowing that she had his attention. Fitz isn’t about to look away from her now.

Finally, her message finished, Jemma’s arm falls back to her side, moving through the rock like a knife sinking through syrup. She’s tired now, the blur of colours in front of her starting to turn black at the edges, threatening to sink her down into nothingness again. It’s unbelievable, really, that so simple an action has sapped so much energy from her.

 In front of her eyes, the indented impression she has left on the rock reads a message:

_“.. - ...   --- -.-“_

_“its ok.”_

Fitz knows morse code; she knows he does – they used to use it on the backs of one another’s hands to talk during lectures. Jemma doesn’t know how well her inverted message will read to him, but she knew that she had to try. And now, she has to put her whole trust in hoping that he will know how to read her again.

She hears Fitz breathe out with a gulp and she tries to imagine how he looks: one foot on the step leading up to the case, his face level with where hers is so that, if the surface of the rock turned transparent, she would be able to look right into his eyes.

Jemma imagines that his eyes would be wide with hope.

‘Okay,’ Fitz says, and it’s everything Jemma ever needed to hear. ‘Okay. It’s okay.’

There is a soft clunk and now she knows that he must have been standing almost exactly where she had pictured him because he was close enough to rest his forehead against the glass. If she could move that far, Jemma would try to do the same.

‘It’s going to be okay.’

The last thing Jemma sees before the blackness pulls her under again is her message, slowly fading away from the wall of the rock until it is gone.

 

 

After that, everything becomes a whole lot easier, if not for Jemma then for the rest of her team.

In finding a way to communicate from the inside of the rock out, Jemma becomes able to provide them with the missing links in their Kree investigations – she gives short, one or two word answers to the bombardment of questions Skye has from her research into Kree technology, and she is able to reply with a firm _“-. ---“(“no”_ ) when Hunter asks again whether smashing the rock could be the solution.

Given the way activity at the base seems to speed up every time she gives an answer, it feels to Jemma like they are getting closer and closer to finding out what they need to know.

And if nothing else, her being able to talk to them in however fractured a state puts an end to the dubious mutterings of any members of the team who had been doubtful of her survival in the rock in the first place.

‘How do you know?’ Mack asks in a murmur, maybe a day after her first morse code conversation with Fitz. He is speaking in a low voice, obviously hoping it will be low enough for her not to hear. ‘How do you know it’s actually Simmons talking to you and not…not some damn alien thing just _pretending_ to be her?’

If Jemma’s body and mind had not been held captive by the tar-like substance inside of the rock, she might have found the energy to be offended.

‘I just know,’ is Fitz’s reply.

‘But how?’ Mack presses, and it is this simple exchange that reminds Jemma of how little he knows of the two of them.

She imagines that Fitz shrugs slightly before responding. ‘She could have told me anything,’ he says eventually. ‘Anything at all. She could have asked for help, she could told me she was hurt or asked what was happening, anything at all. But she didn’t. She wanted to tell me it was okay instead.’

There is a movement in front of her and Jemma imagines Fitz attaching another sensor to the front of the glass case, bringing him a step closer to bringing her back to him.

‘It’s Jemma,’ he says firmly, and that is that.

Of course, in other ways communicating with the team makes Jemma’s life inside the rock a lot harder. The exhaustion that came with moving her arm the first time she did it doesn’t go away; she only gets better at resisting the urge to sink back into darkness, gritting her teeth to the blackness and forging on instead.

It is difficult to tell this to the others without worrying them though, which means that often she is faced with a flurry of urgent questions that she doesn’t have the energy to answer and enough frustration to make her want to burst into tears. Sometimes, her letters will vanish from the wall of the rock before she has had the chance to complete the word, and when this happens Jemma almost thinks she _will_ burst into tears. But then she hears Fitz, or Skye, or Bobbi coax her to try again and she pushes down on the tiredness threatening to overwhelm her and lifts her arm to re-trace her letters.

There will be time to sleep, she thinks to herself.

_Once I help them get me out of here, I can sleep_.

They’re getting even closer to that now; more days must have passed, even if Jemma has lost count of them, and now she can hear the movement of machinery around her, as if her teammates are anticipating that soon they will be needing the space.

Her suspicions are confirmed when she hears a small tap against the glass, a tap that she has come to know as Fitz’s fingertips.

‘Not much longer,’ he whispers. ‘We’re almost there. I promise.’

Jemma hopes that he is telling her the truth.

When she last opened her eyes, she couldn’t move her legs.

 

 

When it had first swallowed her, Jemma had felt like the world had been sped up. As she had hit the floor, feeling the pull of the rock against her legs, closing in over her head and dragging her under, it had felt like she had been going at top speed, too quickly for her to even remember how to scream. But then after that, everything had slowed indefinitely. Until, that is, she had first heard the heartbeat.

Now, she finds that it ends in the opposite way to how it started.

It starts slow, with Jemma feeling a tug in her gut, pushing her forward so that her head begins to move too, bending her over until her chin starts to curl into her chest. Her knees are caving as well; she can feel them start to sink lower as she is pushed further forward until her body must be almost diagonal in the rock, a coiled spring ready for release.

Something is pushing down on her, like the palm of a hand on a ball of dough, but it is slow, so slow and yet Jemma can’t quite process what is happening until it does.

And when it does, it feels like the world has been sped up again.

Her head breaks the surface first, and the first thing Jemma finds herself thinking is how bloody _cold_ it is; honestly, what is Coulson using the S.H.I.E.L.D reserves for if not for heating and light? But then her neck is out of the rock, and her shoulders too and suddenly she is moving too fast to be thinking of anything, other than that she is going to fall down and be sucked back in again.

From what feels like very far away, a voice gives a yell.

‘Now, grab her _now_!’

Suddenly a pair of arms comes from behind to wrap around her, latching firmly around her waist and under her arms and they pull, lifting her up high enough so that her feet fall out of the rock and finally she is free.

‘Close it!’ Jemma hears Coulson’s voice call out, louder than she remembers and twice as clear, and there is a sharp clang of glass door as the owner of the pair of arms staggers backwards a few paces with her before trying to rest her down gently on the floor in front of them.

It doesn’t work though, as Jemma’s feet don’t seem to be able to find any solid ground to hold on to and she can’t stop her knees buckling underneath her, sending both her and the person still holding her tumble to the ground in a cacophony of limbs.

‘Jemma?’

It is Fitz’s voice again, in her ear this time instead of separated by a layer of glass and an alien rock, and although he sounds breathless and worried, it is still everything she needed to hear. Jemma opens her mouth to try and reply to him but her throat contracts instead, and all she can give is a frightened little gasp.

‘Everyone stand back!’ she hears May order, and instantly Jemma feels several presences in the room fall away from her and it feels like the space around her has trebled in size.

From underneath her, Jemma feels Fitz shift, pushing himself up into a sitting position with one arm while keeping her propped up with the other. She wants to open her eyes, reassure him that’s she’s okay, but it’s taking all the energy she has just to stay awake.

‘Jemma?’ Fitz asks and she can feel by the way his arms tighten that his anxiety has shifted up a notch. ‘Jemma, say something.’

She’s trying, desperately so, and she wants to tell him that, but the tightness in her throat is spreading down through her chest and making everything feel heavy and the only sound she can make is a ugly gurgle from the back of her throat, where something is preventing her from doing anything else.

‘She can’t breathe.’ Fitz realises what is happening before she does, and he repeats the words in a panic. ‘She can’t _breathe_!’

Jemma hears May drop to her knees beside the two of them, but before she can do anything the heaviness in her throat starts to rise up into her mouth at an alarming pace. Quickly, Jemma twists against Fitz so she is leaning over one of his arms away from him and May, managing it just in time before she starts to retch.

Almost instantly, Fitz tightens his hold on her again to keep her upright and Jemma feels May’s hands, cool and steady, come up to hold her hair out of the way while she coughs, the sides of her throat feeling as slick as if they were coated in petrol and tasting about the same.

She splutters, as the last of the liquid drips from her lips.

‘Oh, God.’ Skye’s voice is muffled by her sleeve, but even that can’t mask the hysteria in it. ‘Is that blood?’

‘No,’ May breathes, and Jemma hears Fitz suck in a gasp as he starts to lift her back up and away from the floor.

Blinking a little in the harsh fluorescent lights, Jemma opens her eyes.

Lying on the floor in front of her is a shiny black puddle of liquid rock, that even as she watches starts to pull itself back together until it is not a puddle anymore, but a small cube about the size Fury’s toolbox had been, a cube of rock that had been caught inside her throat and preventing her from breathing.

‘Holy _shit_ ,’ Hunter says, in a voice caught part way between disgust and awe.

Exhausted, Jemma sinks back against Fitz’s chest as the heaviness inside her chest returns, pressing down on her lungs until it feels like they are shrinking and growing as heavy as stones inside her body instead of organs.

There is movement in the room now, as people start to rush towards her, or out of the door, but Jemma can’t really make them out – they are blurs, blurs of motion and colour to match the fractured speech she can hear them call out to one another over her head, blurs that are slowly being replaced by blackness.

_Sleep_ , she remembers, gratefully.

_Now, I can sleep_.

 

 

The next time Jemma wakes up, she is drowning for the third time in her life.

But this time, it is not water flooding in from the bottom of the ocean that is filling her lungs, nor is it the tar of a liquid alien rock sucking her into its blackness. It is air this time; it is air that is suffocating her and making her chest feel so light she thinks it might burst.

And it hurts like _hell_.

A flare of panic rises up inside her as the air continues to flow and Jemma’s hands catch on a blanket as she tries to bring them up to her face, frantically trying to claw at the plastic mask held over her mouth and nose, pumping more cold, smothering air into her body.

She needs it _off_.

‘No, no, no, Jemma, wait!’

Suddenly more hands cover her own, pushing them away from her mouth and the flow of air stops abruptly. Jemma opens her eyes just as Fitz’s hand slides underneath her head to lift the mask off her and then to lower down her back, helping her sit up.

Once she finds herself upright, Jemma Simmons is able to take in a deep breath in for the first time in days. The air, proper air this time and not the artificial oxygen from the mask over her nose, feels cool and welcoming and safe against her skin.

It feels like coming alive again.

Fitz holds her while she sucks in several more deep breaths, and then he leans back to grab something from the bedside table. It is only then that Jemma realises where she is: she’s in the med-bay, in one of the smaller rooms to the back of the base where it’s quietest. There’s an oxygen concentrator next to the bed and an IV line connected to her right forearm, carefully pumping water and nutrients back into her body. Along these instruments is another heart monitor, which is emitting steady, familiar beeps even as she listens.

On the other side of her bed, Fitz is sitting in a chair and he is holding something out to her.

‘Here,’ he says, and Jemma sees that it is a cup of water.

_Water_.

Eagerly, she reaches out to take it and it is only when the first sip hits the back of her throat that she realises how thirsty she was. She drains the cup in several greedy gulps, before noticing that Fitz has to hold it for her at the bottom, since her own hands are trembling too much to keep it up and feels her cheeks flush in embarrassment.

Jemma’s hands fall away from the cup as Fitz reaches behind him to put it back on the table and then he helps lower her back down onto the bed again before hovering there, leaning over her.

‘Fitz,’ she croaks.

‘Yeah.’ He rubs at his temples with one hand but manages to give her a weak smile even so. ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

Jemma tries to smile back, but when she looks beyond the smile on his face to the strain underneath, she finds that she can’t. He is pale, apart from the purple bags under his eyes, which confirms her suspicions that he hasn’t slept properly for days. Now that her mind is no longer slowed by the rock, the concern that this raises for her is almost overwhelming and she has to choke back a sob.

‘I’m sorry,’ Fitz says, obviously seeing her distress and misinterpreting it ( _not for the first time_ , Jemma finds herself thinking), ‘about the mask. It’s not very comfy, I know, but, well…It was necessary, I’m afraid.’

_Necessary_? That didn’t make sense. An oxygen concentrator was usually only necessary when…

Jemma swallows back the lump in her throat. ‘Why?’

Fitz hesitates, and Jemma sees his eyes cloud over briefly before he drops his head to the floor, rubbing his palms together. ‘You stopped breathing.’ He looks up, but when he does it is straight past her to the wall. ‘Twice.’

Jemma feels her heart drop into her stomach at the weight of this information and for a moment she struggles to breathe again.

‘Wh- When?’

‘The first time was just after we got you out,’ Fitz says and his voice is careful, like he thinks speaking too loud will hurt her. ‘We managed to get you down here just before you stopped. And then the second time was about…’

He pauses to check his watch; Jemma glances down at it too and sees that it’s almost three in the morning. She feels another pang in her chest – Fitz should be sleeping right now, like the rest of their team probably are, and yet he is here instead, sitting watch by her bedside. The false air inside her lungs now feels like it has been replaced by the heavy weight of guilt.

‘…Seven hours ago?’ Fitz pinches the bridge of his nose and squeezes his eyes shut; Jemma has a very good idea of the kinds of images that must be running through his mind right now. ‘Yeah, about that. It’s been about fourteen hours since we got you out now.’

Jemma lets this information sink in, her head already racing with newfound questions now that her mind is her own again.

‘Why?’ she starts with and it comes out in far more of a whisper than she had meant it to.

‘The, uh, the first time it was more of the rock,’ Fitz says. ‘But it was stuck in your lungs and starting to turn back into…well, rock, again. So we used a, uh – it was Skye’s idea, actually, I can’t take any credit for it – a chest tube to extract it, and then we got you breathing again. She helped me hold the tube steady.’

Jemma feels a small bloom of pride at hearing this, at hearing and then she frowns. ‘How…how much…?’

‘A litre,’ Fitz whispers and when his eyes come up to meet hers she sees the thinly veiled fear set in them.

‘What about the, um…’ She pauses to lick her lips, which she notices only now are dry and cracked. ‘The second time?’

Fitz shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. We’d got all the rock out of your lungs by then, and you’d just been sleeping and then suddenly…’ He breaks off, his eyebrows knotting furiously together and he blinks, several times. Jemma waits, biting her lip.

‘Bobbi thinks,’ he continues after a minute, ‘that it was some kind of culture shock. That your body had adapted to the conditions inside the rock and coming back out of it was too much for you to handle and everything just…’ Fitz makes a small sinking motion with his hands. Jemma notices how hard he is trying to keep his hands from shaking. ‘…Shut down.’

He stops talking after that, as if he is expecting her to respond, but she doesn’t, even though she wants to. The room falls quiet, except for the tentative and regular electronic beepings of the machines around them, and Jemma gets the impression that the entire base is filled with this kind of enveloping silence and that is has been for hours.

Fitz must have been sitting with her surrounded by that quiet, with the beeps and his own thoughts for company, for maybe just as long. It’s a hauntingly familiar situation that even now makes a sick squeeze at Jemma’s stomach and she has to swallow back bitter bile.

Or maybe that’s just still the taste of the rock in her mouth.

‘Fitz?’

His head jerks up a little too quickly, his eyes anxious. ‘Yeah?’

‘Do you want me to, um…?’

Fitz shakes his head almost immediately, the frown on his forehead turning fierce. ‘No. I don’t want you to do anything. Not right now.’

Jemma licks her lips again and nods, letting her head sink further back into the pillow. Her gut stirs again, but this time at his blatant concern for her and gentle care.

It had been ten years, and still it never failed to surprise her.

‘But actually,’ Fitz adds, standing up to fiddle with the IV lead. ‘You should probably get some more rest. This thing’s doing a lot, but, uh, you going back to sleep would help it a lot. After all, sleep is the best medicine.’

Jemma feels the corners of her mouth curl upwards at the familiarity of the words. ‘That’s what I always say.’

‘I know.’ Fitz glances down at her and gives a wan smile. ‘Where did you think I learnt it?’

He sits back down, still smiling, and then waits almost expectantly. Jemma does too, once again allowing herself to watch his face and the dark rings around his eyes telling her that he could use the rest just as much as she could.

After a few seconds, Fitz sighs, as if he should have anticipated this.

‘Jemma, go back to sleep.’

‘I will.’ She fixes him with a stern look. ‘If you will too.’

Fitz blinks at her and his mouth hovers open, on the edge of forming words his brain is still trying to form for him. In the corners of his eyes, tears start to shine.

Ten years on, Jemma thinks again, and he still got surprised at how much _she_ cared for _him_ too.

‘Yeah.’ Fitz nods, ducking his head and nodding once before looking back up at her with a brave smile. ‘Yeah, I’ll go to sleep too. Soon,’ he promises, and Jemma realises that, for now, a promise like that was as good as she was going to get.

He slumps back in his chair and crosses his arms firmly over his chest like he is settling himself in as a watchdog, like someone is going to come crashing through the door and try and steal her away again. Jemma watches, and she sees the tension still strained across his shoulders.

‘Fitz?’

Once again, he looks up at her almost before she’s finished getting his name out. ‘Yeah? You okay?’

Jemma hesitates, her teeth nagging down on her bottom lip.

It has never been easy for her, this kind of thing. These kind of _feelings_ , especially when they were these feelings, her feelings for Fitz.

What she had said to him in the locker room, the words she had managed to splutter out before he had left with Coulson had been the hardest thing she had ever done; it had been harder than throwing herself out of an airplane, harder than all those months spent at Hydra, harder even than hauling two bodies up from the seafloor with only enough oxygen for one.

Those things, she realises now, had all been easy, because she had been doing them for him. It was only now, when she was trying to do something for herself that everything became so much harder.

‘Could you just, um…’ Jemma gives a shaky sigh, but even then her voice manages to crack at the end. ‘Hold my hand?’

Fitz looks a little taken back at the simplicity of her request, but then it is only half a beat before he nods.

‘Yeah. Yeah, ‘course I can.’

He reaches over to take her hand in his and as his fingers thread through her own, Jemma breathes out in relief. His skin is warm, and cracked at the places where callouses are and she hasn’t nagged him to put cream on, and against the cold of her own hand is wonderfully comforting.

‘Go to sleep, Jemma,’ Fitz whispers again, and this time she nods, letting her eyes drift shut so she can’t see him anymore.

But she can feel him still, and he stays sitting by her side and holding her hand, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth.

The last thing Jemma knows before she falls asleep is the gentle thrumming of Fitz’s pulse against her hand, and the rhythmic beating of the heart monitor, letting her know that despite all the odds they are both still alive.

And, safe in the knowledge of that, Jemma allows herself to sleep.

 

 

 

 

When she finishes, he will prop himself up on one elbow to look at her.

‘But that’s not the end.’

He will sound indignant, like a child she is refusing to finish reading his favourite book to.

‘I know,’ she will say.

He will reach out and brush a lock of hair off her face with his fingertips.

‘So tell me how it ends.’

‘I don’t need to,’ she will say simply, and roll onto her side so she can look up at him.

He will huff, and lower himself back down next to her with a frown on his face. ‘And why not?’

She will smile at him and stretch herself up on the mattress so she can press a light kiss to his lips, and he will fold into her touch in the way that it will become so familiar for them to do they could do it in their sleep.

Against her chest, she will be able to feel both their hearts beating.

‘Because after that, you were with me too.’

 


End file.
